


A Very Ari Memory

by quantumoddity



Category: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe - Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Awkward First Times, First Time, First Time Hand Jobs, M/M, Outdoor Sex, Romantic Fluff, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-20
Updated: 2018-04-20
Packaged: 2019-04-25 11:30:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14377722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quantumoddity/pseuds/quantumoddity
Summary: Ari doesn't have the best memory but he keeps hold of what's important. In particular, the events of one amazing night in the desert with his boyfriend of nearly a year, Dante.





	A Very Ari Memory

When Ari goes back and thinks about that night, not so much in the days and weeks and months after but more in the years, the decades, the longer periods of time he hadn’t even been able to comprehend when he was seventeen and still struggles even now he’s in his forties, what he remembers most about it is the cold. How cold it was to lie on his back in the bed of his truck, in the middle of the desert on the outskirts of El Paso, after dark.

He’d confesses this jokingly to Dante, one evening when they’re putting off falling asleep because that means not seeing each other for eight hours and neither of them can bear the thought. They’re lying side by side, hands intertwined, Ari pushing back a loose strand of Dante’s hair that he can tell is bugging him but he won’t pull away to take care of himself, and he mentions , offhand like. Dante feigns horror and indignance, kicking him lightly under the covers where their legs are just brushing each other.

“We have literally the most romantic first time ever, something right out of a romance film, and all you remember is how fucking cold you were?” he’d huffs, scowling and pouting exaggeratedly until Ari is laughing and kissing him to bring his smile back, just as he knew he would.

He isn’t mad, not really, or even particularly surprised. Of course that’s what his husband remembers.

He’s Ari.

 

And besides, it wasn’t just the cold he remembers, the chill of the metal bed with no shirt to dampen it, only the thin blanket he’d started keeping back there. He remembers the stars too.

 

***

 

Ari knew Dante wanted to ask. He could see it in his eyes sometimes, when they’d inevitably joke about it or when they’d be kissing, hands would be wandering, tongues would be pushing lightly past lips, heartbeats would be picking up side by side and things would be creeping further and further but never quite far _enough._ But he never did ask, as much as they both knew he wanted to. Ari loved him for that. He loved him for a lot of reasons, more than he could really count, more being added to the list each day.

He just wasn’t ready. It was a cliché thing to say, to even think, but it was true. He wasn’t. And Dante was okay with that, happy to wait for Ari to be the one to actually say it. He would never ask more of his boyfriend than he was willing to give, especially not with something like this. So he just waited, the question deliberately unspoken and yet resting on his tongue.

Ari, meanwhile, was struggling to not make a big deal about it. Which was a paradox in itself; stressing about not stressing about something. When he would catch himself agonizing over it late at night when he couldn’t sleep, in those hours where the thoughts you didn’t want to think somehow swelled and stood up and jumped for attention. _Why wasn’t he ready? When would he be ready? How could he make himself ready? How’s it even going to work? Was Dante mad at him for dragging his feet?_ When that happened, he would fight back, shove his face into the pillow, aggressively think about something else. No. He was not going to overthink this, not this. Things always got messy and complicated when he let his brain chew over them too much and he would be damned if he was letting it happen with something this important.

It helped that what he and Dante had was so perfect, in and of itself. Even without the actual act, without taking that final step and crossing that line, they had achingly beautiful moments together. Of course, there were embarrassing ones too but even they had their charm, in a goofy, teenage boy kind of way. Like the time Dante had (after asking permission, of course) slid his hand down into Ari’s jeans as they’d been making out on his bed. It had been scary sure, for a few moments, but then it had been wonderful.

A little too wonderful, given that after an embarrassingly short amount of time, Ari had felt himself shudder, letting go of whatever it was even as he’d scrambled to keep a hold of it, and made a frankly mortifying noise as he came on Dante’s palm. He’d been about ready to just jump out of his window or bury himself alive in an unmarked grave, whichever would work, until Dante had coaxed him out from under his blankets, grinning and clearly hiding laughter. He’d kissed both of his burning cheeks, his forehead, his nose and promised they’d laugh about this in the future when they were both forty and married.

God, Ari loved that Dante thought about that kind of thing.

So yes, Ari’s new plan was to not get worked up over having proper, full blown sex with his boyfriend for the first time. He was going to be chill about this. He _was_.

There were a lot of things Ari couldn’t really explain, especially when it came to his love for Dante. One of them was how one night, specifically that night in the desert even though it was no different from any of the other times they’d gone for a drive together, he went from being Not Ready to being Ready.

 

They were arguing about the relative merits of studying the night before an exam. Exams were taking up a good ninety per cent of their brains these days, as they were for all seniors.

“I’m just saying, anything you don’t know the night before you just aren’t going to know,” Ari shrugged, leaning against the back of the truck bed, bouncing his leg lightly.

“Short term memory, Ari,” Dante rolled his eyes, fingernails tapping out a senseless rhythm against the glass of his coke bottle. He was splayed out like he always did when he relaxed, his long limbs taking up most of the space, body propped up on the driver’s cabin across from Ari, “What if you manage to cram in this one key fact at the last minute and it’s right there on the paper the next day?”

“See, the fact that you ever think you’d be that lucky says so much about you,” Ari chuckled, only half paying attention to their debate, more focused on the way the moonlight was casting shadows on his boyfriend’s face.

“What?” that face split into a grin, his comfortable, familiar grin that hid nothing, “I am a lucky guy, I know this for a fact.”

“Oh yeah?” Ari lifted an eyebrow.

“Yeah,” Dante’s expression softened, “Cos I have you.”

Ari felt his face heat up, felt his eyes flicker down to his hands. He didn’t like that he couldn’t meet Dante’s eyes when he said stuff like that but he was comforted by the fact that he knew him well enough to read him, to see how much his words meant to him.

“Come on, dude,” he muttered, still blushing, “You can’t just win arguments by complimenting me. That’s abuse of your boyfriend powers.”

“Is it now?” Dante sniggered, setting aside his coke, resting it on the top of the cabin behind him. He moved to sit closer to Ari, eyes catching the moonlight, their dark, openness drinking it.

“Uh huh,” Ari had to swallow hard again.

“And what would a suitable punishment be for such a transgression?”

“ _Transgression?_ You ass.”

“Your ass.”

“Maybe,” Ari murmured as he kissed him.

Dante kissed him back, eagerly, a small, soft laugh escaping. Ari felt the warmth of it, it made him shiver in a very, very good way. Then Dante’s hands, big and splayed and long, were holding the sides of his face, Ari was tilting his jaw up just a little so their noses didn’t bump into each other, his own hands taking hold of the front of Dante’s shirt.

They stayed like that for a long time, though not exactly like that, there was some moving and shifting and sighing. They spent a lot of their time alone together kissing. Ari, a guy who had never really been good at expressing himself with words, had found that he could say a lot more by kissing. Dante was very, very happy with this arrangement.

He’d thought saying it, actually getting the words out, would be difficult. Some words had weight, had a momentum to them that made them awkward and terrifying and hard to say; he’d expected these to be like that.

But they weren’t. They came so easily, as they were catching their breath in between kisses.

“I think I want to have sex with you,” Ari murmured.

Dante wasn’t good at hiding his emotions, it wasn’t how he was wired. And in that instant, Ari was glad of that fact as he saw excitement and relief and joy and a hint of nervousness crash across it, completely unrestrained and unafraid.

“You’re sure? I’m fine to take things slow…”

“We’ve been taking it slow,” Ari shook his head lightly, “I’m good. I want to, Dante.”

“Now?” a hopeful smile, his thumbs stroking Ari’s hairline.

“I mean…” Ari frowned, confused, “Don’t we need stuff?”

To his credit, Dante looked a little coy, as coy as he could which wasn’t all that much.

“Well, I have condoms and lube and stuff in my bag…”

Ari gave a bark of laughter, half out of amusement, half out of shyness, “You are shameless.”

“Hey, I just wanted to be prepared,” Dante shrugged, chewing his lower lip a little, “I mean…I’ve wanted this for a long time, Ari. A long, long time.”

Wanted. That was a word to make Ari’s throat close up and his eyes prickle. He was wanted. He’d been wanted, when he hadn’t even realised, when he’d thought it was impossible for someone like him.

“I love you,” was all he could think to say and even those three words didn’t feel like enough.

“I love you too,” Dante looked like he might cry too but they both tightened their grip on their control. How were they going to get anything done if they were both crying like idiots?

Getting the clothes off was the easy part. They’d seen each other naked before, it was been a slightly strange idea of Dante’s just after they’d started dating, to strip off in front of each other. That was nothing new, Ari was more than familiar with what Dante looked like, the sharp angles of his swimmer’s muscles, the freckles he had on the lines of his hips, the soft, brown, slightly curled hair that started off somewhere around his navel and ran down between his legs. Though it still made his mouth feel weird and dry and made his head spin a little, especially now, with the moonlight making him look like something from another world, something way too beautiful and perfect to exist in the world Ari knew.

Ari didn’t know if angels were a real thing (and he doubted very much that they’d be down with having gay sex) but, if they were, they’d look like Dante looked that night as he crouched over Ari, knees on either side of Ari’s hips as he himself lay out on the thin blanket lining the bottom of his truck bed.

“So…” he said thinly, immediately cursing himself for finding the most ridiculous thing to say when you had the world’s most beautiful guy leaning over you.

Dante didn’t seem to mind, he just smiled, eyes full of something that Ari was almost scared to call love because, if it was, what had he ever done to deserve so much of it?

“You’re okay with being on the bottom then, huh?”

“Is that the technical term?” Ari wrinkled his nose, grinning a little.

“I looked at some magazines, okay?” Dante shrugged, his blush fiercer on his lighter skin.

“Okay, we need to talk about where the hell you got those kinds of magazines from,” Ari snorted with laughter, the kind of laughter that feels a little panicked but is no less sweet, “But yeah, I’m good with this.”

“Great…” Dante nods, relief in his smile, as he leaned down and kissed Ari again. The kiss was a little different to all their others, there was a little more intent in this one, the sense of a road to walk beyond it.

Clothes were easy. Kissing was easy. Lube turned out to be one of the trickiest things known to man. Dante dropped the bottle twice as he attempted to get it where it needed to go, making them both laugh helplessly.

“It’s really slippery, okay?” he protested, voice weak from his giggling.

“Good, it better be,” Ari said pointedly.

They managed to wrestle it into submission eventually, leaving Dante’s two longest fingers shining slickly in the moonlight, dripping onto Ari’s bare stomach but he didn’t mind. It made his insides feel tight in a good, excited kind of way.

Dante kept kissing him, like if they could distract their brains with that, they’d feel less awkward about what was happening further down their bodies. What was happening was Dante’s free hand moving Ari’s knees apart so he could settle between his thighs, stroking them idly as he did, admiring how they were pretty much just pure, unyielding muscle from his running. His fingertips traced down their slope, finding the scars from his surgery, still not fully healed. Maybe they wouldn’t.

As he felt Dante’s gentle, reverent touch, Ari thought that maybe that would be okay.

But then his hands were going other places, not up but further down. To where his skin was raised and uneven and warmer, until his fingertips were resting right over his entrance, halting for permission.

He gave his permission with a low, desperate moan against Dante’s mouth, his hips shifting forward almost of their own accord in a clear plea.

The intrusion felt strange at first, Ari’s body tensed at it, uncertain. It was new, something he’d never felt before, a tension and a stretch in his muscles that made his hair stand on end.

“Relax,” Dante breathed as he kissed along his jawline, lips brushing that sensitive spot on his neck, making it very, very easy to obey.

It was much easier after that, Dante’s fingers opening and relaxing him. His hands were always so careful and precise with what they did, artist’s hands, hands used to pulling something beautiful out of next to nothing. Ari felt like that right now, like something beautiful.

“I think that might be enough,” Dante murmured, sitting back up on his knees with a tense look of focus and concentration, too soon for Ari’s taste who would happily have laid there kissing and being explored by him for the rest of his life, cold or not.

He felt so exposed and hollow when those fingers were gone, like the chill had a way to leech into him now. But then there were those hips again, the warmth of his boyfriend’s body close to his and something hard resting against him.

“Is it going to hurt?” he blurted out suddenly, feeling childish.

“Maybe for a second?” Dante didn’t sound as certain as he had, “But if it keeps hurting we can stop, no problem, you just have to say.”

That was enough for Ari, finding it was surprisingly easy to trust someone when you were completely naked and they’d just had their fingers in your ass. Provided the person was Dante.

But even as Ari laid there, braced, nothing happened. He craned his neck to look at his boyfriend, blinking, “You okay?”

“Yeah…” Dante was biting his lower lip again, the bridge of his nose wrinkled, “It’s just…”

Ari waited, letting the silence stretch on, waiting.

“I read about it and I thought I knew what I was doing?” he eventually murmured, voice soft and vulnerable, “But it’s so different when it’s you, Ari. Your legs, your thighs, your dick. I didn’t realise…how different it would be. To do it, to do it with you.”

“Like…good different?”

“Yeah,” he smiled, face open and honest as his own sketches, “Really good.”

It did hurt, when Dante moved into him with a slow roll of his hips. Enough to make Ari hiss and grip Dante’s shoulders harder than he’d meant to, so hard there would be scratches. But Ari had known a lot of different kinds of pain in his life, sharp and dull and fierce and shallow and quiet and roaring, inside and outside. But as his body stretched beyond what he’d ever asked it to do before, as he and Dante became as close as it was physically possible to be, Ari felt the first good hurt of his entire life.

And it didn’t last, it soon faded as they began to move together, following instincts they didn’t know they had. It wasn’t perfect, it was stuttering and uncertain and hesitant, Dante had to change the motions of his hips after a straight back and forth wasn’t doing anything for either of them and Ari kept slipping on the smooth surface of the metal, taking Dante’s dick in directions the rest of his body wasn’t going in, which was a problem. It didn’t last long either, of course it didn’t, with two unexperienced seventeen-year-old boys frantically rutting on a truck bed, both too lost in the scary, insane, beautiful things they felt for each other.

But it was perfect. Despite all that, it was perfect. Sometimes things that didn’t go to plan could be like that.

Ari’s orgasm took him by surprise as he choked out Dante’s name and spilled something hot and sticky across both of their stomachs. As he did, there was a sharp moment of fear where he thought the skies above him, the bright, beautiful stars he could see over Dante’s shoulder, were tearing apart but no, that was just his vision blurring as his eyes filled with tears. Dante wept too as he came a few seconds after, making Ari give an undignified but pretty adorable squeak as he felt his length throb inside him.

When they both realised the other was crying, they began to laugh as well, foreheads pressed together, lips meeting in hurried, messy kisses as they held each other tightly.

Yeah. It was pretty damn perfect.

 

***

 

It’s the cold and the stars that Ari remembers. He thinks it’s because those sensations are things he’s never experienced since. But loving Dante, having Dante in him, breaking apart in Dante’s arms and being put back together again, those things he doesn’t remember.

Because why would he have to? He gets to have those every single day of his life.

 

**Author's Note:**

> First time writing for this fandom! I'm on Tumblr, my-dearesteliza


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